Thursday, October 11, 2012

My friends, document your life, as it goes by a lot faster than you can imagine

Email: brqyvn@gmail.com

Hi Photographer friends,

I have been involved in photography, one way or another, since I was a teenager. I've always used Pentax cameras from the get go. I was looking at my shoe-boxes of print the other day, as I want to put my pictures in order and leave them to my two grown daughters, while I'm still kicking. I worked hard all those years learning the craft of photography and I think I succeeded in shooting fairly good images regularly. I shouldn't toot my own horn, and I'm not. I judge my images by the compliments I received.

Never-the-less, while looking at these pictures, I realized that about 90% of them were about scenes, places I visited, landscapes, beautiful sunsets, rare cars, and all kind of "people-less" images. Since I was often the picture taker, I have practically no pictures of myself. I have some pictures of my loved ones and friends, but that's about 10% of the pictures.

It's a little late to go back, and the precious moments I missed are only stored in my memory. I can't share them with anyone. Beautiful images of places, landscapes, sun sets, etc, are a dime a dozen. Pictures documenting your life are priceless.

My friends, document your life, as it goes by a lot faster than you can imagine. Take pictures of your children, your parents and your friends. You will cherish them later on in your life. Don't just take digital images, and save them on your computer. Gather the images you like best and have them printed, then do it the old fashion way by storing them in albums or shoe-boxes. There are no electronic in paper prints and unless your place burns down along with the pictures, you should be able to keep them for all of your life and pass them on to your children who could pass them on to their children, and so on. These are irreplaceable and actually in case of a fire, you need to save the people and pets first, immediately followed by your photo albums / shoe-boxes.

The current generation does take more pictures than any generation that preceded them, but they share them on Facebook, emails or saved them on volatile hard drive, DVDs, memory sticks, or web sites that may not be there next week. Trust me, the old way of making prints and putting them in albums is still the best way to conserve your precious memories. Computers will continue to evolve and the SDHC cards or DVDs and hard drives you use today may not be compatible with what will be available twenty years from now. Computers and storing devices will crash for sure, sooner or later. That is a fact, as mechanical and electronic devices all fail eventually.

I am using this blog to encourage my own daughters to listen to my advice. They do send me images of them and my grand children all the time, and I love that. I am making a printed album of them, but I urge them to get prints made out. There is so much joy in looking at photo albums or sorting through shoe-boxes full of old pictures. It brings family together. Twenty years from now, those pictures will be priceless. If you think twenty years is a long way ahead, just wait till you get there. You will be amazed as to how fast you got there. When you look forward, time seems to go so slow, but when you look backward, it's amazing how fast it went.

Here's some images of my daughters and some my girls sent me, not necessarily taken with a good ole Pentax camera, but mostly on their cell phones. Some images are from my shoe-boxes, when they were little girls. (I will post about the cell phone phenomenon versus DSLR cameras in a future post.)

My girls at a very young age. (Scanned prints)

My girls a little older, showing sisterly love. (Scanned prints)

My girls not so long ago. (Electronic file)

The following images are all priceless, but I don't think they were made in prints.